On the 28th August, shortly after getting our 14,000th follower on Facebook, we received one of those emails that makes your heart not just sink, but plunge through your stomach and crash onto the floor.

Facebook had deleted our page from its network.

In this post, I’ll provide some hard-won tips that’ll show you:

how you can avoid losing your Facebook page

what to do if your page is deleted

why and how to diversify your traffic sources

how not to lose your Facebook page in the first place!

6 tips to save your page

First up, here are six tips that night help you avoid having your Facebook page deleted in the first place.

1. Read and re-read the Ts and Cs—and keep up with the updates!

I’ll start with this one, as I believe this was the key mistake we made!

We’d been through the network’s Terms of Use with a professional Facebook agency, and thought we were acting in accordance with their guidelines—not using Facebook ads to advertise our products, but promoting them from time to time on the page itself, for example.

A week or so before we lost our page, Facebook emailed us with some updated terms and conditions. If I had taken the time to read them, we might still have our page today.

3. Don’t upload copyrighted material

These days, everyone shares images on social network. However, if someone complains about some material you have shared, you could find your post deleted. Check that anything you share is available for public reuse before you publish it to Facebook.

5. Get your Facebook name right

6. Create multiple page administrators

Two examples of lost pages I came across when I was researching this post included:

cases where admins accidentally deleted the page themselves

pages being lost because an individual admin had his or her personal Facebook account deleted.

Choose your page administrators carefully, though—these admins will also have the ability to delete you, the page creator.

What to do if your Facebook page is deleted

Those are the basics, but the Facebook terms and conditions can change at any time. What can you do if you suddenly find your Facebook page has been deleted?

1. Appeal

When you get Facebook’s email about your page’s deletion, you’ll also get a link to a form that allows you to appeal the action.

Although we didn’t get a reply to our appeal, there’s always a chance you will, and a few other Facebook admins have managed to have their pages restored.

If you work with a social media agency, you might also find that they have a contact within Facebook—see if they can use their contact to get an explanation and make an appeal. Unfortunately, to date, appealing has not worked for us.

2. Pause any advertising for your page

In our case, Facebook continued to take money for ads that pointed to our defunct page. Make sure you cancel those ads, or you’ll be wasting money!

3. Create waves

Some bloggers who have lost their Facebook pages have managed to get them back by creating a community backlash.

When Ken Envoy of SiteSell lost his Facebook page and its 16,000 members, he immediately published a blog post titled, Urgent: We Need Your Help.

He urged his readers to spread the story, and credits his Facebook page’s restoration to their efforts.

We’re trying to do the same thing, and have set up a petition to ask Facebook to warn admins and give them a chance to change their pages before deleting them.

4. Make a story out of your loss

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”—Winston Churchill

We blogged about our story, and it went viral! We were astonished to get over 2000 shares of our first blog post about our Facebook page loss.

I also contacted several bloggers about our story when we created our follow-up petition post. As a result, Aaron Wall very kindly shared the story with 68,000 followers, Amy Smarty from MyBlogGuest signed our petition and shared the story, and ProBlogger invited me to write about the story!

It doesn’t make up for the loss of our page, but we received a lot of heart-warming support, and got some good links from other blogs out of the loss.

5. Start a new Facebook page—quickly!

People joined your Facebook page for a reason: because they liked it! Some of those people will join your new Facebook page, and you might be surprised at the kind messages of support they add to your page.

It’s worth starting the page quickly, and with a similar name—then, people looking for your page will be able to find it before they have forgotten about you!

Obviously, it’s important to also try to analyse why Facebook might have deleted your page, so you can avoid making the same mistakes again.

A lesson learned: diversify your traffic sources

Another key lesson we learned from this experience was not to rely one source of traffic. Our Facebook page was important to us—too important—but luckily, we also have other sources of traffic.

If you are relying on any one source of traffic, remember it can disappear rapidly. Work hard to make sure you are diversifying your traffic sources! Here are several which work well for us:

Pinterest

Google+

search engines

affiliates (only relevant if you have a product to sell)

advertising

Twitter

specialist forums

our newsletter

blog links

blog commenting

specialist blogger groups on Facebook (If there aren’t any in your niche, why not start one?).

Have you ever lost a Facebook page? If so, what did you do? Let me know in the comments!

James Dunworth is the author of the Ashtray Blog, where he writes about e-cigarette news and tobacco harm reduction.